So, you want to monitor a brand, or many brands. You want to know everything that is being said about your brand online, no matter who is saying it or where. You want to know everything and you want to be sure that you know everything. You want confidence and omniscience.

Until recently, the best solution for many of us has been something like Google Alerts. You enter your search terms (“Macintosh OR Mac -cheese -Fleetwood” and so on) and you get tens, hundreds, or even thousands of items a day; you know everything.

Or do you?  How capable are you, as a human being, at finding the most important information in a sea of data? Let’s take a shot at figuring that out.

On the plus side, people are very sophisticated text processors. We are highly skilled at reading a piece of text, understanding its meaning, and placing it in context with other information about the brand we are monitoring. We are very good at knowing what’s important.

But how do those skills scale at the volume we’re dealing with on the web? The problem isn’t “how skilled are you?” but “how much can you read?”.

Let’s say that you need to monitor the Macintosh brand. A quick search of Google Groups for “Macintosh OR Mac -cheese -Fleetwood” returns about 5,750,000 posts over the last 3 months; that’s about 64,000 posts per day. So, if you read 10 posts an hour, for 16 hours a day, for three months straight, you’d cover less than 0.3% of the posts about Macintosh computers!

Even with your tremendous ability to identify important content, you would be missing up to 99.7% of the posts concerning your brand. And, don’t forget, your time has been completely monopolized by one brand, so you are completely ignoring 100% of the rest of your brands (not to mention your family, social life, and general hygiene).

So, if you truly want confidence and omniscience, you do not want a service that gives you a bunch of posts to read, you do not want a monitoring solution. What you need is a system capable of processing all of your posts and finding the important information for you. This would free up your time to perform the important in-depth analysis for which there is only one tool: your human brain!